¡I love the Spanish upside-down exclamation and question marks! ¿Don’t you?
I’m serious. In fact, when taking notes or otherwise writing by hand (pretty rare these days), I use ¡ and ¿ in my English. Both marks give the reader a useful heads-up that a text is about to depart from simple declarative prose. It’s surprising that ¡ and ¿ haven’t caught on beyond Spanish — not even in Catalan or Portuguese.
I’d been speaking Spanish for a couple of decades (well, maybe more) and teaching Spanish for a couple of years when it finally struck me, after red-inking yet another student paper with an abominable construction of the Paco’s libro ilk, that Spanish doesn’t use apostrophes at all.
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In a previous post, I explained that Latin’s long nn turned into the ñ sound of Spanish, which resembles the ni in onion. For example, Latin annus “year” became Spanish año. This development is also the source of the letter ñ itself. The squiggly tilde ~ over the n started as a shorthand form of the letter n, so that ñ stood for a double n, i.e. n over n. Once the symbol was established, it came to be used for instances of the ñ sound that had other origins, including:
The ñ was already in use by medieval times. In fact, you can see it in the earliest known example of written Spanish, a 14th-century transcription (in Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional) of the oral epic poem El Cid. In the excerpt above, from the first page of the poem, there’s a visible tilde in the word señor, the third word in the last line.